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KimThomas

For modern teenagers, mobile phones are more than just accessories; they’re a way of life. So why not take advantage of students’ familiarity with mobile technology to make it the basis for new and engaging methods of learning?

MobiMissions makes use of one particular feature of some recent models of mobile phones. All mobile phones connect to their network through a cellular system. As phone users move about, their phone connects to different mobile phone masts that control different cells, each of which has a unique ID. Some of the more recent models of phones, such as the Nokia Series 60, can access their current cell ID, which can be used as a rough location identifier. Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, and his team at the Mixed Reality Laboratory had already used this location-identifying feature in a game called ‘Hitchers’, in which users could pick up hitchhikers as they moved between cells.

The idea of the MobiMissions project is that the players set each other ‘missions’, leaving them in a particular cell. Players wandering into that particular cell are able to see any missions left there and decide whether to accept them. A five-week trial was carried out with 17 students (aged between 16 and 18) from a post-16 centre in Bristol. Each student was equipped with a Nokia phone for the duration of the project. All the missions, and the responses to them, were loaded onto a central web server, where they could be viewed later.

The template the students were given to create the missions was fairly open-ended, says Lyndsay Grant, a Futurelab learning researcher: “We wanted people to be able to set missions or questions or reflections for each other that they were interested in being constrained by a pre-determined format. The open-ended nature of the experience means that while some of the missions created are just banal, some of them are much more thoughtful.” The players themselves much preferred to find and respond to interesting missions, and some players put a lot of time and effort into creating missions and responses that they thought would engage other players.

Over the five weeks, 73 missions were created by players. “They varied hugely,” says Lyndsay. “Some of them would be requests for information, or quiz-like questions, whereas others were more conceptual. For example, one was ‘Take a photo to sum up your childhood’, and the responses to that included roller boots, while somebody else took a photo of chocolate, and someone else took a baby photo.” Players were rewarded with points for creating and responding to missions, and were also able to award points to each others’ missions and responses through a rating system. Most players were not very interested in points, being far more motivated by feedback from other players in the form of comments on the website, or through their responses to missions themselves.

While 73 missions were created, only 31 were responded to by anyone other than the author of the mission. A small number of missions attracted a large number of the responses, particularly those that had been used at the beginning of the trial to ‘seed’ the game, which were not attached to any particular location and so were found far more frequently. The most popular missions also included those dropped off in particularly-frequented locations such as the participants’ college.

What did the students make of it? “They liked the idea, and they were pretty enthusiastic – they really loved it when other players responded to their missions,” says Lyndsay. “But they were a little bit frustrated that there were fewer responses than they’d hoped for.” One reason for the low response rate to some missions, she says, was that a number of students would set missions at home, in the evening. Naturally, it was much harder for other players to pick those missions up unless they also found themselves in that location.

The game was more successful on occasions when friends gathered together to play “in cafes, in schools – the kinds of places where kids would generally gather together anyway,” says Lyndsay. Students found it much more “motivating and exciting” to make or respond to missions with friends, and players who played with others created and responded to more missions than those who played alone. “We often think about mobile phones as very individual, personal things – that you as an individual connect to other individuals – but what often happens with teenagers is that one person’s mobile phone is shared around the group and so it becomes a social tool. And because students who played together were in places where other people went, the missions they made were also more likely to be picked up by other people.”

This MobiMissions trial was relatively small-scale, says Lyndsay, and its true potential may lie in a mass-scale game that can be played by anyone, wherever they are. She also thinks the idea could be developed further in a number of interesting directions: “Rather than playing anywhere and everywhere, we could focus on a specific location much more, such as a theme park, or a stately home and its grounds, or a museum or even historical battle sites.” You could even choose a series of linked locations, she suggests: “If you were going to several different sites relevant to a particular historical period, you could find content left there by other people who were leaving their reflections on these places, and these could range from factual information to personal reflections from people who were involved, to questions left by other learners who had been there before.”

Or the missions could be used in schools and colleges: “On field trips, perhaps you could exchange reflections with other learners over a long period of time. If you were studying a pond, and different groups of learners went there three times a year and picked up the missions left by the previous people each time, you could ask, ‘How has this changed over the year?’ So it could be used in a more formal education setting as a data gathering and data exchange activity.”

The MobiMissions trial was the first of its kind using cell-ID technology for learning. Further research and exploration will be needed to exploit the potential mobile phones have to facilitate collaborative, location-based learning – so this could be the start of something much bigger.

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